Posts Tagged ‘urban planning’

I’m using this platform as an archive for a conversation with Kayla. A PhD candidate at The University of Melbourne; who’s doing urban mapping or in her own words:

The course I’m doing is under School of Arch & Design. My main background is Landscape Architecture and for the PhD, I look into temporary markets. I would say it’s a mix of landscape architecture + urban/city + and “the everyday” things that go in between. And yes, I’ve never thought maps and mapping could be this fascinating too. It’s amazing to see a place/city differently once they are mapped in different ways.

She’s also the sister of Nadirah who’s a photographer in New York, whom I met last month at the Work Presentation session at The Republik Studio. I still owe her the editing of last bootleg video.

Now I’m committing my passion for time-lapse with another passion of mine: infographics.

My Del.icio.us account is populated with the infographics, information visualization, information design, infosthetics, statistics and timeline analysis. I’m used to bookmark tag with Del.icio.us, now I’m in semi-comatose mode ever since the news of Yahoo going to shutdown Del.icio.us. There’s even category for del.icio.us that I use in this blog with the help of xmlrpc.php.

Before I knew of Kayla work. I’m already set off on cataloguing the urbanscape of the city and the littoral space of my hometown — demarcated space of white sand and the blue sea, with sparkling stars above.

Her work on urban mapping is a great interest of mine, as the work-in-progress that I do for month long personal project of mine, involves with night market/temporary market (pasar malam) in urban city.

It’s an exciting notion that my work could be used for someone in their intellectual pursuit in the academia world of urban planning.

I’m pretty much an accomplished motion-control time-lapse photographer/videographer, but I need help with visualizing the soundscapes of the city into some form of waveform infographics.

The visual and interface design of Mark Coleran is the best place to start for inspiration. The time-lapse footage with the visualisation of soundscape, time countdown and sun dial would be an exquisite final product.

Mark Coleran: Domino

Mark Coleran: Domino

Mark Coleran: Mission Impossible 3

Mark Coleran: Mission Impossible 3

Mark Coleran: Mee-Shee: The Water Giant

Mark Coleran: Mee-Shee: The Water Giant

Mark Coleran: Mr. & Mrs. Smith

Mark Coleran: Mr. & Mrs. Smith

Mark Coleran: The Island

Mark Coleran: The Island

Lovely interface design, but I’m looking for more simplistic interface.

I just realised that my personal project on urban time-lapse with the Kessler Crane Elektra/Oracle system have greater impact in urbanscape mapping not just in time-lapsing per se.

What’s the traffic condition, the flow of pedestrians & vehicles, the light pollution source, the hygiene indicator, the environment controller & the of course the aesthetic aspect of the light play itself on low shutter speed.

I’m doing personal motion control time-lapse with Kessler Crane Elektra/Oracle system at Cheras’ (or M’sia even) longest night market, every Wednesday at Taman Connaught. This is called urban mapping?

I just realised that my personal project on urban time-lapse with the Kessler Crane Elektra/Oracle system have greater impact in urbanscape mapping not just in time-lapsing per se.

What’s the traffic condition, the flow of pedestrians & vehicles, the light pollution source, the hygiene indicator, the environment controller & the of course the aesthetic aspect of the light play itself on low shutter speed.

All this from a simple time-lapse. Wow.

Yes, I would say time-lapse photograph can be a kind of mapping when we specifically know what we want to document, or “reveal”. And the best part, sometimes what we find stuff that we did not expect.

In the Lorong TAR Night Market project, I wanted to understand how the back lane is occupied across time, just like you posted: changes in how the space is utilized, flow of pedestrians & vehicles, etc. We did the same for Petaling Street and it’s amazing to see how vendors bring in their kit-of-parts to set up night stalls in the middle of the street market. It almost seemed like a choreography of some kind: they come in, they install, they vend, people come. When the market closed, they uninstall, they go out, and by midnight, the garbage collection service comes and cleans the street. By morning, everything was back to normal.

For my project, we had to do the shooting manually every half hour to every hour (thanks to my husband for shooting most of it!). If you want to shoot Lorong TAR, start shooting from the morning because the vendors start setting up their stalls as early as 10 or 11 am (we only started in the afternoon and by that time the lane was pretty much filled with tents already). And yeah, Taman Connaught Night Market is definitely the longest night market – stretching about 1km if I’m not mistaken! If you have time-lapse photos of this, hope you won’t mind sharing with me. Would love to see how the super-long night market becomes a pop-up city over the night!

By the way, I recently found some works by Olafur Eliasson that also uses time-lapse.

I would love to. I’ll be more “industrious” with my time-lapse editing this upcoming month. I’m juggling between two jobs, offshore engineering & cinematography, and time-lapse as my past-time passion.

Check my flickr and Tom Lowe’s Timescapes.org for the kind of work that I’m doing. For the flickr there’s only one time-lapse video. I’m not much a zealous uploader. I will soon, in my Vimeo account.

Thanks for the pointer. I’m cataloging a couple of night market. Taman Connaught is the hardest due to the length. And I could only make one time-lapse per week, with different perspective (usually on the elevated pathway).

I’ll try to post one of the perspective soon.

Thanks for sharing your thought. I’m very keen in architecture, urban planning and design too. I hope the time-lapse work that I done could show something about the need for better gentrification project for the Malaysian community.

The data was sourced from the city council. As in the previous map, each colour represents each day. In this map, the tallest bar represents the highest number of stalls, which marks the largest or longest night market. Now that I’m taking a second look at this, Pasar Malam Taman Sri Petaling on Tuesday nights actually has 900 stalls – marked by the tallest blue bar. Pasar Malam Taman Connaught comes in second with 702 stalls. Now that we’ve seen temporary markets as an amazing phenomenon in the country, we should be able to anticipate this in our future city planning (read: phd contribution, hopefully!)

Sri Petaling (Tuesday) is near my Oil & Gas office. Taman Connaught (Wednesday) is near my apartment. The infographics and the statistics are useful in order to get the best of the time-lapse exposure. The larger the traffic, the better the flow of the time-lapse can be captured.

I agreed with the urban planning to redesign more public space i.e. temporary markets and gardens for the community. We’re choked with the concrete and the asphalt, we forget how lush the empty space are.

Now I know what I’m looking forward to this week. That, and all the the delayed editing of past videography work, and one of them is the bootleg video of your New Yorker sister last Work Presentation at The Republik. The one I uploaded at the youtube is a raw file. Grainy — should have use faster prime lens. Oh, well.

Cheers!

+++

Last night I was at the Vincent Moon & Efterklang, An Island screening at Eightyfourcube Studio. Even though it’s an acoustic short film yet soundscape of the landscape plays a vital part in the film.

Since I’ll be at the place for hours. I might as well capture the soundscape of the place and translated it into infographics of peak wave form.

There’ll be mash of time-lapse and wave-form graph. Like some wicked sci-fi movie. Hahaha. I’m just being optimistic. Is there an apps for capturing the waveform into infographics other than me just print screen the Final Cut Pro’s sound bar?